#000495
Rock Scales for Guitar
Al Clausen
A slim, no-frills instructional booklet from Hal Leonard's "Guitar Techniques" series, aimed at the intermediate rock player who wants the essential scale shapes laid out cleanly in tablature. In a handful of pages, Al Clausen maps the pentatonic, blues, and modal patterns that underpin most rock and blues lead playing, the kind of movable fretboard shapes a guitarist internalizes and then forgets they ever had to learn. It is the opposite of a coffee-table book: cheap, practical, and meant to live on a music stand until it falls apart. Long out of print, booklets like this were the workhorses of a generation of self-taught players in the pre-YouTube era, and they turn up now mostly as well-thumbed survivors.
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The author
Al Clausen is a guitar instructor and the author of several short method booklets in Hal Leonard's "Guitar Techniques" line, including companions on lead rock licks. He is a working pedagogue rather than a celebrity player, and little biographical material circulates about him—these booklets were sold on their utility, not their author's name.
The book
Rock Scales for Guitar is a roughly sixteen-page tablature primer covering the movable scale shapes—minor pentatonic, blues, major, and the common modes—used across rock, blues, and country lead guitar. The format is deliberately spare: diagrams, tab, and just enough text to explain how the patterns connect up the neck.
How to read it
As reference, not reading. It assumes you already play a little and want the shapes organized in one place. Modern free resources have made this exact information ubiquitous, but the booklet's compactness is still its charm—everything a beginner improviser needs on a couple of foldout pages, with nothing to distract.
For more context
Players wanting the underlying logic rather than just the shapes will get more from a fuller method such as Barrett Tagliarino's Guitar Fretboard Workbook.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Al Clausen
- Publisher
- Hal Leonard
- Place of publication
- Milwaukee, WI
- Year
- 1986
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Music
- Location
- Colorado